Chapter 27 #3
She was never supposed to be here. But now it depends only on her how quickly the blood will flow and silence will settle around us.
Come on, dusha moya... Shoot at me and put an end to the agony. Just a little more, and everything will be over.
Ekaterina
“Look at me!”
His voice, deep and powerful, is like a saving hand pulling me out of the deep, filthy water I’m drowning in.
It brings me back to reality, but everything is so painful that I wish I could lose myself in the cold abyss.
But he won’t let me. His eyes, in those stunning different shades of gray and brown, try to help me be strong.
But I can’t anymore.
The tears flooding my eyes deepen the terror. It feels as if I’m in a frozen lake. I don’t know how to swim, and now I’m surrounded by that same horrifying feeling of death.
But it can get worse, because fate wants to prove how cruel it is, playing with the revolver I’m being forced to hold, pointed at the man I love.
My hands are shaking violently around the weapon that feels heavier than my own body.
I can barely breathe. I can barely think coherently, because my mind is running desperately in a thousand directions, trying to find a way out of this situation.
But there isn’t one.
Time is not on my side at all, pushing me closer to an agonizing end. And precisely because of that, terror paralyzes me almost completely, reminding me that I’m one step away from death. My death. But above all, his.
“Ekaterina, look at me!”
I move my gaze, blurred by the tears streaming down my cheeks, to his face.
He is so beautiful... From the first moment I saw him, I was fascinated by his perfect features and those differently colored eyes. He made me forget how to breathe properly, filling my mind with forbidden thoughts.
And even now, with blood running toward his chin from his lower lip, split and slightly swollen, the one I would kiss endlessly, or with the bruise starting to bloom beneath his injured eye... he is still beautiful.
“It’s going to be alright,” he tells me with conviction, his eyes pinned to mine. “Raise the gun, dusha moya.”
Almost hypnotized by his words, I raise the revolver for the third time, gripped by even more panic than before, ever since this game began.
A palm slams hard onto the metal table separating me from the man I continue to stare at, clinging to the sight of him like a lifeline.
One I am about to kill.
“I don’t have all day, suka!” the man beside me yells, dragging the thick fingers of his other hand through his hair. “If you don’t move faster, I’ll shoot, but with my own gun. And I assure you this one is full of bullets, not just one.”
He hisses the last sentence into my ear, but the one who makes me react is still the man in front of me.
“Do it, Katya. It’s going to be okay.”
He sounds so certain of it, but I know too well that I can’t believe him anymore.
It won’t be okay at all.
Chances of both getting out of here alive shrink with every shot. We’re on the third round, and so far we’ve managed to survive, but I know it won’t be long before one of us dies. And I hope this isn’t the moment when everything ends and he is killed by my hand.
I want him to live. He has to live and avenge my death.
With difficulty, I raise the gun and try to control my trembling hand. I point it at him again, and a painful sob escapes my chest when I see him smile at me. And he does it so sincerely that I want to scream in frustration because I’m receiving something so beautiful only now, right before dying.
How can he smile at this moment, when this could be the last one we spend together? He never smiles, but he does now, as if it is a farewell written in the blood that will be spilled between us.
There is no clearer sign that this is our end.
That’s why the words I wanted so badly to tell him today slip past my dry lips.
“I love you,” I whisper, and my voice breaks after the first syllables. “I love you so much...”
He tenses for a moment, but then raises an eyebrow at me, as if I’ve just told him I stole candy from a child’s jar.
“Now you choose to confess that to me?”
Two guns immediately aim at my head and his, both held by the bastard beside me, cutting off any attempt to prolong this moment. Maybe the final moment.
No. I refuse to be the one who kills him!
I start repeating the prayers I’ve been invoking since all of this began, begging Divinity to spare him. Let me be the one who dies when it’s his turn to shoot at me, not the other way around.
God, save him this time too!
“Faster!” the bastard beside me yells, growing more nervous.
“It’ll be over soon, dusha moya. Come on, pull it,” the man in front of me urges with the same calm voice. “It’s going to be fine.”
I want to believe him. I almost do, and that’s precisely why I slowly pull the trigger.
Only this time, there is no hollow, dry click to calm my heartbeat for a split second.
This time, the deafening sound freezes me completely, and the blood that splashes across my face and touches my lips, the lips he once tasted, destroys the last shred of my sanity.